Unpayable Debt Co-director Appears on Latino Rebels Podcast
Frances Negron-Muntaner discusses the recent protests in Puerto Rico in conjunction with her Valor y Cambio project.
On the eighth day of on-going protests in Puerto Rico Unpayable Debt co-director, Professor Frances Negron-Muntaner, discussed the overlap between her community currency project Valor y Cambio and what has come to be called the Puerto Rican Spring on the Latino Rebels Podcast.
To hear the entire interview listen to the podcast here.
For more on Valor y Cambio click here.
Frances Negron-Muntaner is a filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is also the founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive.
NYTimes article on the importance of the work of academics in Turkey
The work of CSSD fellow Ayse Gul Altinay, among others, is highlighted.
CSSD colleague Ayse Gül Altinay, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Center at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, was sentenced to 25 months in prison earlier this year. The important work of Ayse Gul Altinay is highlighted in a piece in The New York Times this week. Full article here.
"The work of academics has been critical to the process, piecing together more complete histories to promote understanding and basic human rights. The ongoing repression will cost future generations knowledge that is vital not only to overcoming past trauma, but also to easing the perpetuation of conflict."
CSSD Welcomes Paige West as Director
Co-director of Reframing Gendered Violence and Pacific Climate Circuits working groups appointed as Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference
Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, begins her directorship of the Center for the Study of Social Difference this summer after having served as co-director of two CSSD working groups, Reframing Gendered Violence and Pacific Climate Circuits.
“I’m honored to have been selected to direct CSSD for the next few years,” says Dr. West. “The center’s goal of creating space for our community to come together to work towards scholarship that pushes our understanding of social difference in new directions and that produces social change lies at the heart of why I initially became a scholar.”
Dr. West’s broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. More specifically, she has written about the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood and produced, the aesthetics and poetics of human social relations with nature, and the creation of commodities and practices of consumption.
In addition to her academic work, Dr. West is the co-founder, and a board member, of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. Dr. West is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge.
